Duane P. Harris, CEO, Nemonix Engineering Inc., Northboro

Nemonix Engineering Inc., a Northboro-based company, helps its clients maintain aging computer systems no longer supported by the original manufacturers. The company, which was founded more than 35 years ago and employs about 20 people, supports legacy systems originally developed by Digital Equipment Corp., Hewlett Packard, IBM, Compaq and Sun Microsystems. In February, the company appointed Duane P. Harris, then chief operating officer, as the company's new chief executive officer. The company is planning to expand its offering of services to support clients with old systems.

Do many companies rely on legacy equipment?

"A lot of these servers went end of life years ago, but are still being used in a wide spectrum of the market — everything from transportation to nuclear power plants to manufacturing. Most of the folks here have expertise, deep experience, at (Digital Equipment Corp. systems). They were on a first-name basis with the founder of Digital, one of the pillars of American computing firms for decades. Every major corporation purchased these DEC machines. So even though we live in this throwaway culture where the next iPhone is just six months around the corner, the reality is many of our mission-critical applications from ships and aircraft, both commercial and military, to nuclear power plants, are running on these very, very old machines. Our history here at Nemonix has been essentially to stabilize the hardware, to support the hardware, to provide parts for the hardware. Essentially, it has been a hardware-centric life that we have been leading here, until very recently."

Do you consider yourself a manufacturer, making replacement parts, or do you also provide on-site technical support to your clients?

"Up until maybe the beginning of the year, we were essentially a manufacturer of new parts, refurbished parts, for these old legacy hardware servers and systems. And beginning this year, we will be providing support, and we will be releasing additional press releases about our service partners that we are using to help us provide that boots-on-the-ground support across the United States and Europe.

"Customers refuse to give (old systems) up. There are a lot of different reasons. We have some nuclear power plant customers that have very tight regulatory requirements as to what they can have running these plants, as you can imagine. There is a lot of risk involved in running these outfits. So essentially what would happen is if they replaced the old hardware with new hardware, they would have to recertify the entire plant, which is a multi-million dollar problem. The cost is not in the new hardware. The cost is in the recertification process. Similarly, in other commercial enterprises, the cost is not in replacing the hardware. The cost is in replacing the software. In addition, the other huge cost ... all the machines that are related to or connected to old hardware have to be changed. So there are not only changes to the critical equipment. Now you have to retrain the entire factory floor to help deal with this new system. So the cost is huge and way beyond just the cost of replacing the old hardware."

Does Nemonix often have to adapt to changes in the market, as some clients replace their legacy equipment with new systems?

"In the past, the answer would be yes. We would have to adapt every single time there was a new end of life. We then start ramping up with that new product, which is now legacy. We sort of look at the world backwards. A machine that is end-of-life is for us now an opportunity. These changes are not about adapting. These changes are about opportunity. We look at this like jumping from one melting iceberg to another. What was state-of-the-art is going to be legacy. That is just the nature of life. The adaption is where our business is. The change is our business. That is where we find our opportunity. With our new perspective, it is not merely about new product offerings or hardware, but also how can we bridge the change for our clients. There is a lot of pain in changing from old to new. How can Nemonix provide bridge technology that will help in that transition? Providing things like emulation that allows customers to keep their old applications but move to new hardware. For emulation, we provide parts that allow new hardware to access old storage arrays. All of these are the kind of things we bring to the table to bridge old and new. We are not only providing parts for the old, but we are also providing solutions for the transition."